{"id":4921,"date":"2010-10-28T06:46:35","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T11:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=4921"},"modified":"2010-10-28T06:47:36","modified_gmt":"2010-10-28T11:47:36","slug":"in-writings-of-obama-a-philosophy-is-unearthed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/10\/28\/in-writings-of-obama-a-philosophy-is-unearthed\/","title":{"rendered":"In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The article <a title=\"The New York Times article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/10\/28\/books\/28klopp.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed<\/strong><\/a> by Patricia Cohen in <em>The New York Times<\/em> coincides more with my view of President Obama than it does with the article&#8217;s author&#8217;s view.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, &#8220;Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,&#8221; Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There\u2019s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most  consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought  developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey  and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin  published his theory of evolution and the <a title=\"More articles about American Civil War.\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/topics\/reference\/timestopics\/subjects\/c\/civil_war_us_\/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier\">Civil  War<\/a> reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to  believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and  that dogged certainty led to violence.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Explanation of pragmatism from encyclopedia of philosophy\" href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/pragmatism\">Pragmatism<\/a> maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to  navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded  experimentation and continuing debate. \u201cIt is a philosophy for skeptics,  not true believers,\u201d Mr. Kloppenberg said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The article Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times coincides more with my view of President Obama than it does with the article&#8217;s author&#8217;s view. In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, &#8220;Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4924,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4921\/revisions\/4924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}